Evolution: Bechly revisits snake explosion (Evolution)

by David Turell , Saturday, June 29, 2024, 18:50 (145 days ago) @ David Turell

Snake evolution is a big bang in evolution:

https://evolutionnews.org/2024/06/fossil-friday-snake-origins-yet-another-biological-bi...

"...there was another open question concerning the origin of snakes: Did their distinct body plan evolve gradually as predicted by Darwinian evolution, or did snakes appear abruptly on the scene as predicted by intelligent design theory? Earlier this year a seminal new study was published by a team of researchers from the University of Michigan and Stony Brook University in the prestigious journal Science.

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" The study found that all the characteristic traits of the snake body plan, such as the flexible skull with articulated jaws, the loss of limbs, and the elongated body with hundreds of vertebrae, all appeared in a short window of time about 100-110 million years ago. This arguably would imply that snakes became “evolutionary winners” because they evolved “in breakneck pace” (Wilcox 2024), which the senior author of the study explained with the ad hoc hypothesis that “snakes have an evolutionary clock that ticks a lot faster than many other groups of animals, allowing them to diversify and evolve at super quick speeds” (Osborne 2024). Well, that is not an explanation at all, but just a rephrasing of the problem. How could such a super quick evolution be accommodated within the framework of Darwinian population genetics and thus overcome the waiting time problem?

" My prediction is that this will prove to be another good example of the fatal waiting time problem for neo-Darwinism. In any case we can add the origin of snakes to the large number of abrupt appearances in the history of life (Bechly 2024), and I am happy to embrace the name coined by the authors of the new study for this remarkable event: The macroevolutionary singularity of snakes. This does not sound very Darwinian, does it? So what do the authors suggest as causal explanation? They have none and the press release from Stony Brook University (SBU 2024) therefore concludes with this remarkable admission: “The authors note that the ultimate causes, or triggers, of adaptive radiations is a major mystery in biology. In the case of snakes, it’s likely there were multiple contributing factors, and it may never be possible to fully define each factor and their role in this unique evolutionary process.” It other words, it was a biological Big Bang and they have no clue what caused it. But of course it must have been unguided evolution, no intelligence allowed!"

Comment: dhw will ask if snakes are necessary for God's goal to produce humans. He made them so rapidly He must have thought so. I entered a more complete coverage of the actual literature here: 2024-02-23, 16:16. There are multiple sudden appearances of species throughout evolution, first admitted by Gould years ago.